Quiz Entry - updated: 2026.10.15
What are the pros and cons of managing devices through the CLI?
Pro: well known, documented, scriptable, built-in syntax help and SSH encryption. Con: hard to scale, many commands with exact syntax to master, slow, one command at a time, unintuitive, changes between versions and platforms, and a security risk.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Well known and well documented | Hard to scale |
| The common, standard method | Huge number of commands |
| Commands can be scripted | You must master the exact syntax |
Syntax help for every command (?) |
Running commands can be slow |
| Connection can be encrypted (SSH) | Not intuitive |
| Only one command at a time | |
| Commands can change between software versions and platforms | |
| Using the CLI can be a security risk |
The pros explain why the CLI is still everywhere: every network engineer knows it, and it works on every device. The cons all come from the same root. The CLI was built for a human reading text on a screen, not for a program exchanging structured data. That is fine for one device and painful for a thousand.